[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Andy Nichols]

>> The chat channels are fragmented these days. There’s the Qt discord channels, QtMob on Slack, Qt and Advanced C++ on Telegram. 

> Are any of these channels endorsed by the Qt project?
> The IRC channels are, that's why I'm raising the question here.

They probably should be.  We list those in our "Online Communities" wiki.  I'm active on the Qt Discord and its quite lively and interesting.

>> Not to mention freenode ones, that no one uses anymore,
> This is a falsehood (they're active both in terms of traffic, and importance of the discussions happening there -- like the release meetings).

IRC has been relatively "dead" for a while now compared to how it used to be.  Even now that we are doing everything remotely IRC is pretty useless
compared to other chat services for collaboration because everything is so manual (sharing code, sharing images, sharing video, having voice calls, sharing a screen).
To get any history you have to run another service, or look at an archive (which I can't even seem to find now for the Qt freenode channels).  I expect to be able to log
Into chat on any of my machines (and my phone or table) and see push notifications when I've been mentioned.  All of these things we have now with Slack,
Discord, Teams, etc.  Those services have set a new standard of what we expect for a chat service.  Dealing with IRC has the same level of experience now that it did
when we dialed in with modems.  

As far as what chat service we *should* use that is harder to say (having previously did battle inside of tQtc over this very topic for our internal chat and getting nowhere).

I expect that something like Matrix would be the only thing the more outspoken members of our community could handle, and I think that would probably
Be a reasonable compromise as it does seem to be quite good.  I personally like Discord but I can understand why people would have hesitations about that.
I did notice that the Godot (open source Game engine) community have recently officially moved there development chat to Discord from Freenode (IRC) and 
The server is very active and vibrant.

I would like to get back to doing more of our development discussions out in the open (like it should be), but right now IRC is not something I want to go back to for that.

I would also like the follow up on one of my previous points.  IRC *is* a barrier to entry when contributing to a project.  It is a pain to setup and use because it is archaic.
One more papercut in the list of challenges to contributing to Qt.  There are students now (born after 2000) who are interested in being more involved in Qt, but have
Never used an IRC server.

Also there was a point about: "do require no registration".  I find that to be an unreasonable thing to require.  If anything we should have more verification in our chat.
We run Qt Project as a meritocracy where it is important that someone is who they say they are (like a maintainer).

If we choose to just move to another IRC service, then it's likely that I'll just continue to ignore it as irrelevant like I do now with Freenode.

Regards,
Andy Nichols

-----Original Message-----
From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2021 12:10 PM
To: Lorn Potter <lorn.potter at gmail.com>
Cc: development at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

Hi,

On 20/05/2021 12:02, lj p wrote:
> The chat channels are fragmented these days. There’s the Qt discord channels, QtMob on Slack, Qt and Advanced C++ on Telegram. 

Are any of these channels endorsed by the Qt project?
The IRC channels are, that's why I'm raising the question here.


> Not to mention freenode ones, that no one uses anymore,

This is a falsehood (they're active both in terms of traffic, and importance of the discussions happening there -- like the release meetings).


> or the internal Qt Company Teams. 

These are not relevant for the discussion, I'm talking about the 
_community_ channels, not the internal company chats.


Thanks,
-- 
Giuseppe D'Angelo | giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts